Sunday, December 27, 2015

Venezuelans were
tricked by a fascist plot into voting for the opposition in the December 6,
2015 legislative elections. This, according to an opinion
article by Hernán Mena Cifuentes published by the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, explains the recent counter-revolutionary
electoral behavior of the people.

Mena Cifuentes summarizes
the chavista argument of the people
suffering by a media induced mass delusion: “hypnotized and confused by the
most brutal plot,” and thus “abandoning the most luminous avenue constructed by
Socialism, and following the dark an thorny path of fascism, which will throw
the people, if it does not awake up soon from this imposed lethargic hypnosis,
into the abyss of submission and domination suffered in the past (la Cuarta República.)”

Saturday, December 26, 2015

End of the year infographics by Venezuelan
funded TV channel Telesur. This new collection offers details of a broad
conspiracy against the Latin American left. “In 2015 progressive governments of
Latin America have suffered economic and political internal attacks which they
have denounced as part of a regional destabilization strategy to put an end to
the great social advances of the last 15 years,” explains Telesur.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Government and pro-government forces have been reacting to
Sunday’s adverse elections results. Comments have ranged from the self-critical
to the blaming of an “economic war” waged by the opposition.

Thefirst reactioncame from President Maduro himself.
Right after the electoral authority’s announcement that the opposition had secured
at least 99 elected deputies, Maduro appeared on television from the Miraflores
palace recognizing defeat. He refrained however from directly congratulating
the winners and instead accused his opponents of stepping up the “economic war”
against the country in the weeks before the election. He also called for a
“rebirth” of the Revolution and told his followers they needed to “go from the
current state of difficulties caused by the economic war, to a renovation of
hope.”

On Monday, the
presidentmet with his cabinetand said that the government was
declaring itself in a state of “permanent dialogue with the people, with
criticism and self-criticism and constructive action.” But he also suggested
that the Revolution should go into a defensive/offensive phase. The defense
should be for the safeguarding the social accomplishments of the Revolution
against the attacks form the right.He
explained, “they feel they have power and are already showing their
fangs and threatening to persecute the people. The bourgeoisie is coming to
impose a neo-liberal restoration.” The offensive phase, on the other
hand, should aim at the final defeat of the “economic war promoted by rightist
sectors seeking to generate chaos and destabilization.”

In his televised
address on Tuesday night, Madurosaidhe
would block any amnesty law for political prisoners coming from the new
parliament. He also asked for the resignation of all his cabinet ministers, as
he announced the government will be going into a deep “restructuring.”

Other government
officials also reacted to the results. The PSUV governor of Falcón State,
Stella Lugo,declaredon
Monday that “the government is going into a full state of revision.” She said
however, that the revision should focus not in the government itself, but on
how it had failed to clearly explain the effects of the economic war and who
was behind it: “The opposition won those spaces because of the economic crisis.
But we failed to explain to our people that the crisis had been planned by the
right-wing. The people yesterday drained in the ballots their discontent as a
result of the economic crisis.”

The head of the
PSUV’s electoral campaign, Jorge Rodríguez,also accepteddefeat in a press conference on
Monday. He asked for an internal revision of the government, but also blamed
the defeat on what he called an “atypical campaign.” “While we were in the
street with ideas and proposals, the opposition side didn’t even put any
candidates in the field. Instead they waged an economic and psychological war.
As president Maduro said yesterday, the right-wing didn’t win; the economic and
psychological war and all aggressions suffered by the Venezuelan people won the
elections.” Rodríguez also turned to the accusation made in the past by the
opposition againstChavismoand told the “right” not to take this
electoral win as a blank check. “If the opposition uses this electoral result
as an instrument to attack the institution, well, it will have to face us,” he
warned.

The international
campaign coordinator of the pro-government coalition, Roy Chaderton,said in a
press conferencein
Caracas that the defeat could be explained because “a part of our people,
seriously disgruntled by the sufferings progressively caused by the economic
war waged by rightist sectors, succumbed to the promises of a false change,
which is really a step backwards.”

One of the reelectedChavistadeputies, Earle Herrera,said thatthe results were “an incentive to
consolidate and defend the achievements of the first 17 years of the Bolivarian
Revolution.” He also said that his reelection had not been an essay task
because “the Venezuelan people have been the victims of sabotages of the oil
industry,guarimbas,
economic war, kidnaping attempts, and many more destabilization plots, which we
have been fighting against alongside the people.”

The current
president of the National Assembly and PSUV leader Diosdado Cabellosaidthat
the results were only a slight misstep for the revolution. But he also sent a
message to thoseChavistaswho had switch political loyalties and
voted for the opposition: “if you claim to be aChavista,
but you voted for the opposition, the facts will prove you wrong.” On Tuesday
Cabello declared that the current AN will speed through the appointment of 12
judges of the Supreme Justice Tribunal, before the new opposition dominated
assembly takes over in January 2016.

IndependentChavismoalso quickly reacted to the elections
results. The popular web forumAporrea.org, carried many articles which
backed the government’s line of blaming the economic war for the defeat (read
exampleshereandhere). Some also blamed a lack of patriotism
and loyalty by the people, asking the Lord toforgive the traitors, orclaiming thatthe “the bonds of servitude are still
stronger that those of patriotism.”

Many more pieces
however expressed doubts about the government’s explanations of an economic war
as the main culprit for the defeat and instead squarely blamed corruption and
incompetence within the government (read exampleshereandhere.)

The need for
self-criticism and doubts about the conspiratorial explanations given by the
government were the main points of several reactions from the independent left.
Franklin González, a well-known social sciences professor of theUniversidad
Central de Venezuelaand
former ambassador to Poland, Uruguay, and Greece during the Chávez
administration,wrote in a piecefor Aporrea that the government needed
to learn from the defeat and deal with the everyday problems of the people
instead of blaming everything on a conspiracy. “If a person phones a government
bank and spends an infinite time on hold, without ever reaching anyone to
answer, this has little to do with imperialism and the CIA.”

Nicmer Evans, leader
of the independentChavistapartyMarea
Socialista,said thatthe
government should fully face its responsibility for the results. “I have heard
some government officials blaming the people; instead I think the government
has no one to blame but itself. To say that the economic war is completely
responsible for this is quite frankly to be totally disconnected from reality.”

Sunday, December 6, 2015

If, as most polls
predict, the day ends with a National Assembly controlled by the opposition,
will the government accept defeat?

Here
is a story of a secret meeting of high government officials in the Fuerte Tiuna military compound on
December 4 to discuss the issue. Different versions of this story have been
circulating since yesterday in opposition web sites and social media. Note the presence
of a “Cuban general” in the meeting, and the touching Latin-American hope in
the military finally standing up against the regime:

Friday, December 4, 2015

Despite the importance
conspiracy claims have acquired in Venezuela’s political discourse, both for
the opposition and government but especially as the official rhetoric of the latter,
public opinion experts have paid little attention to the study of the use of conspiracy
theories in Venezuelan politics.

Several pollsters
have included in their surveys questions indirectly related to the beliefs in
an “economic war,” sabotages, or alleged plots to kill government officials. DATANALISIS
for example found
earlier this year that only 9.3% their respondents blamed the private sector
for food scarcities while 50% blamed the government. But late last year IVAD, found
that an impressive 19.9% of respondents believed it was true that the opposition
was planning to assassinate President Maduro. And one of Venezuela’s most
important public opinion agencies, HINTERLACES, has fully embraced the government’s
conspiratorial rhetoric as part of their explanations (see my most recent posts
on this issue here,
here,
and here.)

John M. Carey, Brenda
Nyhan, and Thomas Zeitzoff are, to my knowledge, the first to commission a
survey directly asking questions about conspiracy beliefs in Venezuela. Carey has
published some of the results of that survey in The Washington Post.

One of the most
interesting bits:

We found that belief in conspiracy theories in
Venezuela is widespread. Most notably, while key demographic characteristics
track only loosely with politics, conspiracy theory beliefs are tightly bound
up with Venezuelans’ preferences between the governing chavistas and the opposition.
Moreover, the conspiracy beliefs the government has promoted are far less
frequently endorsed than one promoted by the opposition — an indicator
that the PSUV’s attempts to avert electoral disaster are failing.

What percentage of
the population supports government conspiracy theories, or their opposition
inspired versions, seems to roughly correlate with general government and opposition
support according to recent polls. If the authors are right and “belief in
conspiracy theories in Venezuela is widespread,” did people in the last couple of years simply switch the
conspiracy theories they believe in line with
their political allegiances?

Sunday, November 29, 2015

The Vice-president
Jorge Arreaza yesterday
addressed a group of foreign diplomats accredited in Venezuela and,
according to the Agencia Venezolana de
Noticias, “alerted over the media manipulation of the national political scenario
that is promoted by the right-wing ahead of the December 6 elections, as part
of their plan to sabotage them.”

Arreaza said: “The
media attacks against Venezuela every time there are elections are terrible.
There is a pattern here, a planned and well-rehearsed script.

Arreaza also repeated
the government
version according to which the leader of opposition Party Luis Manuel Díaz
was killed as part of a settling of scores between organized gangs fighting for
the control of Guárico State’s criminal activities. Arreaza said that Díaz had
belonged to the gang of “Los Plateados.”

The Vice-president added
that the Venezuelan government has information that the “ultra-right” is
planning to commit “political crimes with the aim of generating confusion and
of blaming the government for such crimes.”

According to him these rightists
groups are paying between 30,000 and 60,000 dollars to sicarios for the assassination of Lilian Tintori, wife of jailed
opposition leader Leopoldo López, as well as other opposition figures.
President Nicolas Maduro had previously also declared
that “the right” is paying people “up to $50,000 to generate violence in
Venezuela.”

Fortunately, declared
Arreaza, “the government is offering protection to Tintori and to other opposition
leaders that are showing up in intelligence lists as targets.”

The Venezuelan
government backed news channel Telesur is also running a series of pieces
claiming that the opposition is falsely accusing PSUV militants of electoral
violence and that the recent attacks on opposition electoral meetings is all
part of a plot that includes paid sicarios
dressed as PSUV supporters. In this article, “The
false attacks against the MUD in Venezuela,” Telesur explains that it suspects
that the immediate complaints by the MUD of alleged attacks were planned in cahoots
with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis
Almagro, the European Parliament, and the United States Embassy in Caracas.

In a not very subtle
attempt to criminalize the opposition parties umbrella organization Mesa de la Unidad (MUD), Telesur is
running via twitter (@teleSURtv), under the hashtag #MUDmafiososYasesinos, this
information about the “Criminal network of the Venezuelan ultra-right” already published
in August.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Here is an
interesting “infographic” by Telesur. It shows the “five stages of the
electoral coup in Venezuela,” which would be staged by the opposition for the
December 6 legislative elections.

“Why are United States
officials so sure that there will be a complex scenario in Venezuela? Because
there is a five stage plan to stage an electoral coup,” informs Telesur.

The first stage is a
media strategy using “mass psychology.” This media strategy aims at producing “manipulated
tendencies [showing] an opposition victory.” Recent
polls that show a 35 points lead for the opposition can surly be dismissed
as part of the conspiracy. Also part of this stage is the “magnifying” of issues
such as insecurity, scarcity, and the violation of human rights. These are
issues are most obviously not a real problem in Venezuela and are part of a
media construction.

The second stage of
the plot is to denounce an electoral fraud. In order to do this the opposition
is asking for “intervention of international observers and the United Nationals
System.”

The “consolidation”
of International support for the opposition is part of the third stage. The usual
conspirators such as Alvaro Uribe and Felipe González are mentioned, but also
organizations such as the Konrad Adenauer, and the Friederich Ebert foundations
and FreedonHouse.

Opposition street mobilization
is the fourth stage, “especially in the State of Táchira and other frontier
states.” According to the document the opposition has been hording t-shirts “with
the symbols of the PSUV”. Opposition militants would dress as pro-government
supporters and attack electoral centers and State media facilities. The document
directly accuses an opposition candidate for the State of Barinas, Freddy
Superlano, a person “with close links to Tintori,” as the “strong man” for this
part of the plot.

The fifth and last
stage will “achieve that medical centers are not in condition to open during
the days before and after the elections to take care of the wounded.” How the
opposition could effectively close government controlled public health
facilities, is not explained in the document.

The main evidence of
this conspiracy is, for Telesur, are recent declarations by John Kelly, current
chief of the United States Southern Command, and by Thomas Shanon, Counselor of
the United States Department of State, that the “White House is closely
following the Venezuelan electoral process,” and a recent visit to Caracas of a
“parliamentary rights-wing European group,” which met the local opposition.

The source used by
Telesur for this document is also interesting: Hugo Moldiz Mercado, a Bolivian
politician who was briefly Minister of Government in his country in 2015.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Venezuela is again
suffering from a bout of daily electricity blackouts in several regions, including
Caracas. As it has
done many times before, the government is claiming “the right” is
sabotaging the electricity grid and power stations.

President Maduro
yesterday accused “elements of the right” of provoking an explosion at a power station
in the state of Táchira. “I warned about this a week ago, the battered right [derecho maltrecha] is not in an
electoral campaign, it is waging a terrorist campaign, it has an invisible
campaign to harm the people,” said
Maduro.

Electricity Minister
Luis Motta Domínguez seconded Maduro and said “sectors of the right” are to
blame for the explosion at the power station: “they are increasing the attack together
with a media campaign to discredit the workers of CORPOELEC [public electricity
company].” The Minister believes that it is not a coincidence that “blackouts
have increased only two months before the [December legislative] elections.”

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

According to a recent
survey by the NGO Paz Activa about
organized crime, 19.7% of Venezuelans believe the official version by the
government that paramilitaries are to blame for the country’s organized crime. Almost
the same percentage of those surveyed (18.9%) blamed guerillas.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

TeleSUR is the Venezuela
government’s answer to what it considers a biased and imperialist centered
international media landscape. It regularly republishes conspiracy theories
about Venezuelan politics published originally by the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

However, being TeleSUR
a global news outlet, it also gives space to international conspiracy theories.
Here
is a long article published in the TeleSur web page summarizing the most famous
conspiracy theories around the 9/11 events of 2001. The theory favored by the
author of the piece is that the events were an inside job by the Bush administration
in order to start wars and get a lot of oil. A very similar
piece was published by TeleSUR last year September.

The channel’s conspiracy
theorist in residence, Miguel Pérez Pirela, known in Venezuela for claiming in
2012 that the opposition was sending encrypted subversive messages via
newspaper crossword puzzles (here and here), has this video
clip produced by TeleSur explaining what really happened in 9/11.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

The article “Characterizing
paramilitarism” by PSUV leader Freddy Bernal, published in Aporrea.org, is
a good example of a typical rhetorical devise used in conspiracy theories: the
conspiracy theory is true because we repeatedly said it is true and because we relatedly
warned of the consequences of the conspiracy.

It matters little if
the events can also be explained as the consequence of many other causes, for
example: government incompetence. Such explanations will be dismissed as being
also part of the conspiracy, part of a “smoke screen” or “media campaign” to
cover up the conspiracy and blame the government.

According to Bernal, “the
facts, and the actions of the security forces, are gradually proving the
importation of the paramilitary culture in our country. This is a grim [nefasto] phenomenon about which we have warned
time and again, pointing to the relation this plague [paramilitarism] has with
a sector of the Venezuelan right-wing. The repeated denunciations made by the bolivarians about the issue have been disqualified
by the opposition with the argument that they are but a ‘smoke screen’ to cover
security deficiencies.”

The important
premises of Bernal’s argument are: that the actions of the government are evidence of the truth of its own
conspiracy theories, that the links between paramilitaries and the “right-wing”
exit because the government has repeated often that they exist, and that there
is no such a thing as “security deficiencies” in Venezuela.

Follows Bernal´s own
explanation of recent events: “I believe that in Venezuela the right-wing,
having been defeated several times in their traditional conspiratorial formulas
(military coups, magnicidio, street insurrections,
foreign interventions, etc.), has opted for plans to launch paramilitarism in
order to overthrow the Venezuelan government. (…) The capture of the, no longer
supposed but confessed, murderers of Liana Hergueta is evidence without any
doubt of a diabolical cocktail made of opposition parties + paramilitarism + trafficking
of dollars + guarimbas [street
protests] + crime. The story told by the murderers confirms the denunciations
we, the bolivarians, have been making…”

Monday, August 31, 2015

The last time
president Maduro claimed to have evidence of a plot to assassinate him was December
14, 2014. From Ecuador, where he was attending UNASUR meeting, Maduro said
that a sicario had been sent form Central
America to kill him. No evidence was ever shown of the magnicidio attempt supposedly foiled by Venezuela’s secret services.

Today from Vietnam,
where he is signing several agreements, Maduro said
this: “We are being attacked from Bogotá. I have the evidence, and I will
show how from Bogotá there is a campaign to kill me, [a campaign] of hatred,
such as we had not faced in 15 or 16 years of Bolivarian Revolution (…). Unfortunately
the Colombian government is giving its consent [anuencia] and turning a blind eye [to this campaign],” he
added.

Friday, August 28, 2015

This week Maduro’s
government and official media have insisted on presenting the confessions of
José Pérez Venta and Carlos Trejo, the main suspects in the murder case of
Liana Hergueta, as evidence, the only presented so far, that there is a broad
conspiracy by Colombian paramilitaries and the local opposition to destabilize
the country.

The Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) is refuting the claim made by “national
and international media that the [Hergueta] case was a police [sic] case, apparently isolated, of a
murder of a women for money, when in truth it is the evidence of a direct
relationship between right-wing groups in Venezuela and Colombian
paramilitarism and its criminal practices.”

For AVN Pérez Venta’s
confessions have “clearly stablished this criminal relation of antichavista sectors with paramilitary
groups of Colombia.”

The PSUV governor of
Aragua Tareck El Aissami also
revealed in a news conference this week that Pérez Venta had confessed to
being part of a plan to murder Daniela Cabello, the daughter of the president
of the National Assembly Diosdado Cabello.

El Aissami said
that this newly revealed part of Pérez Venta’s confession is evidence that “the
opposition is engaged in the most disgusting violent plans against the country.”

However the pro-government
news portal La Tabla (here reposted by Aporrea) reports
that Andrea González and Dany Abreu, the two organizers of the plan to murder
Daniela Cabello according to Pérez Venta, are a pastry cook and a student of
electrical engineering with no links to the case, apart from Pérez Venta having
named them.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The claims that
paramilitaries are being brought into the country to destabilize fit well with
the government’s narrative that it is fighting a powerful but hidden enemy. In
this narrative the broadly defined paramilitaries serve as agents of a vast
opposition conspiracy plan which helps the government explain its policy
failures as an effect of that conspiracy. The government can blame the opposition,
and its alleged international backers for those failures, and at the same time
charge local opposition leaders and activists with criminal intent.

David Smilde and I
wrote this
post for the WOLA blog. We
summarize most of the claims made so far by the government and some of the
reactions by the opposition and human rights NGOs. Human right organizations
are especially concerned about the upsurge in deportations of Colombian
citizens and about the consequences of thy refer to as the xenophobic rhetoric recently
used by Maduro in his discourses.

President Maduro gave
a press
conference yesterday in which he also made a summary of his claims of “paramilitary
infiltration”. Maduro again accused Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez
of being behind of most of the criminal violence and of the “economic war” in
Venezuela by sending paramilitaries into the country. He also accused prominent
local opposition leaders of having ties with the paramilitaries.

Here is the press
note of the conference by the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias:

Government officials
and state media have been blaming supposed paramilitaries “imported” from
Colombia by the local opposition and backed by the United States, for almost
everything from common crime to street protests.

Here is a sample how Venezuela
government sponsored Telesur has been covering the paramilitary incursions in
the country.

State media has been
showing a video of the confessions of the main suspect in the murder of Liana
Hergueta. Telesur has this
English subtitled version of the video titled: “The Parapolitics of
Venezuela’s right wing.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said 30 groups appear to be trained
and financed by Colombia to destabilize Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro revealed a video Tuesday that shows
links between leading figures of the country's right-wing opposition
with Colombian politicans and paramilitary groups.

In his weekly television program, Maduro showed a video allegedly exposing
groups trained and financed by the former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to
destabilize Venezuela.

In the video, Jose Perez Venta, primary suspect in the murder of
Liana Hergueta, reveals an elaborate network of contacts between far-right
politicians in Colombia, opposition Venezuelan activists, and paramilitary
groups.

"We have identified 30 groups trained and financed by Uribe from
Colombia," Maduro said. “We will capture all paramilitary groups who want
to hurt Venezuela."

Some of the well-known opposition political leaders mentioned in the
video are opposition activist Maria Corina Machado, former mayor of
metropolitan Caracas Antonio Ledezma, and the governor of
Miranda, Henrique Capriles.

According to Maduro paramilitary operatives were ordered to
kill opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez in order to stir chaos in the
country.

"Why did they want to kill Leopoldo Lopez? To blame the
Bolivarian revolution," he said referring to Venezuela's progressive
people's movement that came out of Hugo Chavez's presidency.

President Maduro also alleged that the video reveals the role played by
U.S. officials in destabilization attempts against his country. Perez states in
the video that opposition leaders received financing from the United States and
Spain who then funneled the money to other opposition activists.

Perez specifically names right-wing U.S. lawmaker Marco Rubio and the
charge d'affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Phil Laidlaw, as being
involved.

The murder of Liana Hergueta has shaken Venezuela. The woman’s body was
found dismembered and the Interior Minister Gustavo Gonzalez had previously
said her murder was politically-motivated.

Officials from the Ministry of Justice suspect that Hergueta was killed
for political reasons by groups connected to paramilitaries.

Another news clip by
Telesur in English reports of funding by the United States, according to the President
of Venezuela’s National Assembly Diosdado Cabello:

The head of the National Assembly on Wednesday evening uncovered new evidence that links the U.S.-backed opposition with the gruesome murder case that is shaking Venezuela.

More evidence has surfaced Wednesday for the second day in row, allegedly exposing the violent operations of Venezuela's right-­wing opposition, including explicit details on a controversial murder case that may be financially and politically tied to the U.S. embassy in the country.

Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, released a new video on Wednesday in which Jose Rafael Perez, the prime suspect in the gruesome murder of Venezuelan Liana Hergueta, confesses how he and his accomplice committed the crime and affirmed he received financial support from the U.S. embassy.

In the video, Perez Venta alleges that opposition student leader Gabriela Arellano met with a U.S. officialto discuss an “exit” plan for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, with the intent on finding financial backing to destabilize the country.

In the video, Perez Venta says he and his accomplice, Andrew Carlos Trejo, contacted Hergueta through the mobile phone application, WhatsApp, with the intent of killing after robbing her.

Perez also pointed to United States Congresswoman Betty Grossi alleging that she had financed him and participated in the deadly Guarimba protests of 2014.

Earlier, Cabello said that former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe sponsored paramilitaries in Venezuela with the intent to create social and political instability.

His statements echo the earlier announcement by Maduro, who alleged that the right-wing opposition was linked to Colombian paramilitaries.

The parliamentary leader also revealed a plan by a woman identified as Taiz Gonzalez, aka Dora the Explorer, who is in charge of purchasing chemical substances to be used in terrorist attacks in Venezuela.

“Uribe has financed and sponsored paramilitaries in Venezuela,” Cabello insisted.

The speaker of the assembly also mentioned a person by the name of Jose Luis Santa Maria “whose function is to place explosives in the Miraflores (presidential) Palace.”

Finally, Telesur gives further context to the news with this informative piece in Spanish characterizing opposition leaders as para-politicians: